Arts: Dance, Media Arts, Music, Theatre, Visual Arts

The mission of arts education in Mississippi is to ensure that students know and experience the uniqueness of the arts, understand themselves and their world by creating, expressing, and communicating meaning through the arts, and value the arts as humanity’s most essential and universal language transcending culture, time, and place.

The Mississippi College- and Career-Readiness Arts Learning Standards for Dance, Media Arts, Music, Theatre, and Visual Arts are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that students need for success in college and careers and to compete in the global economy. The Arts standards also serve to empower and inspire arts educators and their students to explore the many facets of the arts and prepare them for a lifetime of engagement with art forms.

Ensuring a Well-Rounded Education means that all students have access and the opportunity to experience a high-quality instruction in the Arts (Dance, Media Arts, Music, Theatre, and Visual Arts).

Mississippi College- and Career-Readiness Arts Learning Standards 2017
Note: It is recommended to print the following documents in color.

Artistic Literacy
To be literate in the arts, students need specific knowledge and skills in a particular arts discipline to a degree that allows for fluency and deep understanding. In all the arts this means discovering the expressive elements and knowing the terminology that is used to comprehend an art form. Students should also have a clear sense of embodying that art form and be able to reflect, critique, and connect personal experience to the arts.

Arts Integration
The Mississippi Department of Education values arts integration which is an approach to teaching in which students construct and demonstrate understanding through an art form in all subject areas. According to the Kennedy Center, Arts Integration promotes student engagement in a creative process in subjects outside the arts. This integration connects an art form and another subject area and meets evolving objectives in both.

Professional Development Opportunities
Mississippi’s Whole School Initiative is a comprehensive statewide arts education program that uses arts as a vehicle for promoting high-quality instruction and learning for students in all disciplines. The Whole Schools Initiative provides statewide support to teachers on integrating the arts to provide learning opportunities to improve students’ academic achievement through the integration of the arts into the core curriculum.

Mississippi Arts Listserv
To subscribe to the Mississippi Arts Listserv, send a message to Limeul Eubanks with "Subscribe Arts Listserv" as the subject of the e-mail. Please include your name, art discipline, (Dance, Media Arts, Music, Theatre, or Visual Arts) as well as the name of your school and district in Mississippi.